The Mellon Foundation is accepting applications for its 2026 Higher Learning Program.
Donor Name: Mellon Foundation
State: All States
County: All Counties
Type of Grant: Program
Deadline: 12/01/2025
Size of the Grant: $100,000 to $500,000
Grant Duration: 4 Years
Details:
Higher Learning’s Open Call for Concepts supports inquiry into issues of vital social, cultural, and historical import. Projects should engage teams of scholars and/or students, and have visible, enduring impact at the institution. The Mellon Higher Learning team will review all submissions and invite a small number of the most promising concepts to be developed into full proposals for potential grant funding.
Higher Learning’s Open Call for Concepts supports inquiry into issues of vital social, cultural, and historical import. Projects should engage teams of scholars and/or students, and have visible, enduring impact at the institution. The Mellon Higher Learning team will review all submissions and invite a small number of the most promising concepts to be developed into full proposals for potential grant funding.
The Mellon Foundation invites institutions of higher education to submit applications for research and/or curricular projects focused on either of the following two areas:
- Unruly Intelligences
- The emergence of generative AI has triggered a firestorm of techno-utopian promises and apocalyptic predictions alike.
- Normalization and Its Discontents
- The concept of normalcy is paradoxical. It entails the statistically average that is at the same time a moral imperative, a completely ordinary state that is nonetheless much to be desired, a cultural ideal. Moreover, the normal often functions as the ideal even when it is not numerically average.
Funding Information
Awards will range from $250,000 to $500,000 for a duration of up to four years.
Eligibility Criteria
- To participate in this call for concepts, an organization must:
- Be an accredited, non-profit, four-year-degree-granting institution of higher education in the United States or its territories that offers a liberal arts education;
- Offer multiple degrees in humanities and/or humanistic social science disciplines (see Eligible Fields of Study in the guidelines); and
- Enroll more than 1,000 full-time, degree-seeking undergraduates.
- The following institutions are not eligible to apply for funding, although they may be referenced as collaborators in applications:
- Institutions based outside the United States and its territories
- Consultants from for-profit institutions
- Fully online institutions
- Research institutes
- Special Focus Institutions, as defined by the Carnegie Classifications. (This includes medical schools and centers and other health professions schools; engineering and other technology-related schools; business and management schools; arts, music, and design schools; law schools that are not housed within an otherwise eligible university; and seminaries or seminary-like institutions.)
For more information, visit Mellon Foundation.
